A popular Presque Isle sandwich and pizza shop is on the market as its owner prepares to retire.
The Sandwich Shop, a staple of the city’s Main Street for 44 years, was recently listed for $498,000 with RE/MAX County.
The business’ last day of operation will be April 30, whether it has sold or not, owner Tim Lyford said.
Lyford opened the business in 1982 and was shortly joined by his brother, Hal. The two ran the restaurant — and later a separate retail storefront in the same building — for more than four decades. Hal retired two years ago, and Tim, now 68, is ready to do the same.
“We’ve been very lucky,” Tim Lyford said. “We have beat the odds. I’ve seen a lot of businesses come down that hill and I’ve seen a lot of businesses go up that hill and we’ve just kind of minded our own business and it’s been very good to us.”
The formula for the longevity of the restaurant — one of the oldest in Presque Isle — is twofold, Lyford said: they worked hard, and kept the menu simple.
“We tried not to be all things to all people,” he said. “I think when you do that you lose your identity a little bit and it leaves open avenues for mistakes to happen.”
That’s not to say The Sandwich Shop has not evolved. Its original menu had just eight items, and now it stretches across a signboard the length of its counter.
“We started and we just did it — and we did everything wrong,” Lyford said. “I learned how to make my first batch of dough the night before I opened this place. I learned to make my first pizza the night before I opened this place.”
Lyford’s Stove Shop, a pellet stove store connected to the restaurant that the brothers launched in 2001, will also close as Lyford retires. The retail space, which they took over after a dry cleaner moved out in the mid-1980s, has gone through several phases.
The Lyfords first sold waterbeds out of it during the peak of the craze for the beds in the late ’80s. When that market dried up, they shifted to normal mattresses, until they noticed that customers were asking more questions about a pellet stove they’d installed in the corner than the mattresses on display.
“Quite frankly, the pellet stove part evolved because I got bored one Saturday afternoon,” Lyford said. “That’s God’s honest truth. I said, ‘We can sell those things.’”
Lyford said he’d like to see someone continue to operate a restaurant out of the space, whether that be as a sandwich shop, pizza place, salad bar or another fare.
“Buy it, revamp it, put your own signature to it,” Lyford said. “There could be a very nice living made out of this place, but you’ve got to work. That’s the big thing … take care of your business, the business will take care of you.”